I almost threw the letter in the trash. The paper felt slick and oily in my hand. Then I almost crumpled it in my fist, then ripped it to shreds. I wanted to burn it. I looked out the window at the parking lot, and the other students with their fancy cars. It seemed like the world just wanted to mock me. I balled the letter up and threw it at the wall. The sound it made as it hit was pathetic, like a lost whimper.

Emotion: contemptuous

Cluster: Anger / Hostility
PC1 (Valence): -0.40 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 2.07

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion contemptuous. During extraction, it was fed through Gemma4-31B and its hidden state activations were captured at 11 layers.

The mean activation across all 1,000 contemptuous stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the contemptuous emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the contemptuous vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
C0.502
l0.423
fact0.287
either0.265
👎0.262
Suppressed:
own-0.367
unexpectedly-0.303
serendip-0.265
Suddenly-0.253
previously-0.250